Safety Behavior

The dilemma of safety is that people often find unsafe behavior is 'rewarding' in some way (e.g. they get the job done quicker, they are more comfortable not wearing PPE, etc), whereas 'Safe behavior' is often punishing (e.g. wearing the supplied PPE is uncomfortable, jobs take longer, etc).

The Antecdent-Behavior-Consequence diagram shows that 'Safety Behavior' is affected by the availability and quality of policies, job plans, materials, equipment and manpower as these trigger people's behavior 'on the job'. For example, if the right equipment was missing at the job site, people will get innovative and either use 'home made' equipment, or take 'short-cuts' just to get the job done. In other words, behave unsafely.

Behaviors are the 'ingredient' that pulls everything together to lead to job completion. If a job goes well despite people behaving unsafely, their 'unsafe' behavior would be rewarded and repeated in the future. If it goes badly, with unwanted injuries, people would find the unsafe behavior punishing. Often, however, people do not get hurt when behaving unsafely, which reinforces the very behaviors most likely to hurt them.

This is a difficult behavioral pattern to break, but we are very successful at improving safety behavior in a wide range of sectors, countries and cultures.

B-Safe® is our fully flexible IOSH award-winning Behavioral Safety approach that helps companies to promote desired safety behaviors, while simultaneously reducing the frequency of unsafe behaviors and injuries. With an enviable track record of success over the last two decades, B-Safe® has helped many companies to reduce unwanted incidents to Zero. Again, the scores obtained from B-Safe® can be used to help determine a company's Safety Culture Profile®'